The processes by which a user of a mobile telephone makes a call are well established.
In order to start a call, a calling party enters, or selects from a contact list, a telephone number of a called party that the calling party would like to call. The telephone of the calling party then generates and transmits a call request to a telephone of the called party. The called party then receives the call and the call request will either be accepted or the request will fail. If the request is accepted, then the called and calling parties can talk to each other over a voice communications call. If the request fails, then a voice communication call is not established. A request may fail for a number of reasons, such as the called telephone being engaged, the called party being away from their telephone, the called party being out of reach (i.e. in an area without mobile signal coverage) or the called party actively rejecting the call request. After a call request has failed, the calling party is usually then provided with the option of leaving a voicemail message. The called party is then informed, by a text message, that a voicemail message has been left for them. The called party can then call their voicemail number to listen to the message. Alternatively, or in addition, to leaving a voicemail message, the calling party may send the called party a text message. For both accepted and failed requests, call records are generated by the telephones of the calling and called parties that comprise details of the call. A call log is stored on each telephone that comprises the call records resulting from a plurality of accepted and failed call requests that each party has had. The stored details in each record typically consist of a telephone number and the time, date and, for each accepted request, the duration of the call.
A number of problems exist with the above-described known processes.
The calling party has no way of influencing how a received call request is seen by a called party. A called party may, for example, decide to actively reject a received call request because was currently in a meeting. This would be appropriate for a call regarding a matter of minor importance, such as a request from his wife to buy some bread on his way home. However, for a matter of high importance, such as their child has been involved in an accident, then refusing the call would not be appropriate. The calling party, however, has no way of providing any indication of the nature, reason, or importance, of a call when sending a call request.
When a call request has failed, the called party will see a missed call notification displayed on their telephone. The called party may also have received a notification that they have received a voicemail message and/or text message from the called party. However, the calling party has no way of providing any indication of the nature, reason, or importance, of the call that was missed. Accordingly, to gain this information, the called party has to call their voicemail and, among all of their messages, find the right voicemail message to listen to before knowing if that missed call was important or not. If a text message has been received, then this is mixed in with any other text messages that have been received and the called party has to read through all of the text messages before determining if anything important has occurred.
In addition, the data stored in call logs is very limited. When viewing a call record, the called party can only determine when the call took place and who the call was with. The called party is not reminded of what the call was about, why the call occurred, where the call took place and any further information that would be of assistance to the called party.
Accordingly, there is a general need to improve the above-discussed known processes to improve the experiences of both called and calling parties.